CAA Medical Question

[Readability5]

This seems a tad unfair but I wondered if anyone else has had a similar experience and if it's worth complaining.

There was a problem with the ECG at my last Class 2 renewal in April (the AME couldn't get the pads to stick and took a reading whilst holding them down). Anyway he made me temporarily unfit and the CAA asked me to undergo a number of other investigations. Those have now been exhausted and a medical issued. But the medical has been back-dated to the date I was made temporarily unfit, rather than the date investigations were completed and a medical issued. So I miss on on 1/6th of the validity period!

Is this right? The CAA attitude is that's a JAR requirement so tough!

[Airclues]

I suggest that you ask this question in the 'Medical & Health' forum.

[Basil]

My feeling is that an unbroken renewal record looks better.
Be interesting to see what Airclues' suggestion turns up.
The dear old CAA can get their knicks in a right twist over a small ECG hiccup.
All because of a small reverse P-wave due to being too relaxed, I had to have a stress ECG followed by a thallium myocardial diffusion scan (sp?)

[cavortingcheetah]

Surely what they have done by allowing your medicals to follow through continuously is to expunge your temporary unfitness from the record.
I would write the medical section a letter stating this and ask them to ensure that all documentation relating to their error in medical findings is destroyed.
I would then copy the previous medical slip and the present one, and a copy of your letter with any subsequent correspondence and put them in your file of stuff which must never be thrown out.
Whatever they may say about the 'failure folder' the unbroken record looks better and you will not have to tick any box at any time which asks if you have ever failed a medical. You have the CAA certficates to prove that you have not.

[Bob the Doc]

ECGs can be a bit of a nightmare. 'Abnormalities' are not infrequently benign or caused by artefact but until you do further tests you can't tell the difference between these and the real pathological ones. Some abnormalities are pretty barn door pathological but that is not what these threads are about.

Many medical tests have a high sensitivity (they catch nearly everyone with a disease) but a lower specificity (they include some people who are fine). No test is 100% accurate. At the end of the day, it is better to be over tested and found to be fine than to be mistakenly declared fit only to end up in a smoking hole in the ground due to a problem that could have been found

[homonculus]

Er.....no actually

It may be advisable to be thorough and investigate true pathology but we may surmise that the electrodes were dry so the operator had to hold them. This makes the ECG unreliable and could well have changed it from normal to abnormal

In this case, even forgetting about the stress, cost and effects of loss of license, unnecessary tests were undertaken. Far from being a good thing they incurred unnecessary risk. We don't know what the tests were so can't evaluate risk but thallium scans and amigos have a risk